Agents on the Ground
by moonswirl
Summary: Prelude #8 to ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, coming in July. (See author's note inside) An AU story set across the Arrowverse. In this installment: ARGUS agent Dinah Drake witnesses a strange encounter thanks to fellow agent Rene Ramirez.


_**A/N:** I was meant to start writing and posting these back in January, however life happened, and progress didn't happen, so now here I am, a little over two months late but finally kicking things off! This coming July, as I've done for the past two summers, I'll be leading a 100-day countdown story set across the Arrowverse (featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow). I decided to do things a little differently this year. For one thing, the entire 100 days will be a single story spread over 100 days, one chapter to every day. And for another, the more planning I did, I saw the possibility and the need to lay in some ground work in the form of preludes._

 _Twenty-four prelude one-shot stories, six each to the four series (again, it was meant so that each month from January to June would have one of each show, but now… yeah ;)), posted every 5 (or 6) days._

 _The story this will all be leading to, **Once More Unto the Breach** , is an alternate universe story (not another Earth, ha :D), which will soon become evident enough. It's very possible you do not watch all four of the shows, but I highly encourage you to seek out the other preludes, as they will help to fill in this world I'm very excited to share with you guys!_

 _Alright, enough chit chat, let's go! If you have any questions, send them my way and I'll be happy to answer them!_

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 **AGENTS ON THE GROUND  
** _Prelude to_ _ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH  
_ (8 of 24)

 **Location:**  
 **MAIN EARTH, THE CITY BENEATH THE BREACH**  
 _ **(ARGUS designation)**_

Dinah Drake had been the one to bring him in. She remembered well how her bosses at ARGUS had shown interest in him, in bringing him into the fold. His skills were not so self-evident if one only knew about his day job. But then they were in the business of knowing more than what was on the surface, and so they knew this was a person who could be an asset to their team. She had been aware of five previous offers to him, to leave his plain I.T. job up in an office tower and instead become an agent of ARGUS, just as she had been aware of five refusals from him. He wasn't interested. And yet they always left that door open, because maybe one of these days he would walk through it.

It so happened that she'd been out near the main entrance the day, two years past, when he finally did walk through the door. She was the one he accosted. She had never actually interacted with him before, but of course she knew of him. Even so, she couldn't help but notice something in his face that day, like he hadn't changed his mind for his own benefits. It wouldn't be on this day that she found out the reason behind this choice, but in time she would.

Rene Ramirez had finally taken up the offer ARGUS had – repeatedly – made him for the sake of his daughter's future, following the tragic death of his wife.

All he wanted was to provide her with as good of a life as he could give her, and once it fell to him alone to tend to her needs, he feared his office job would not be nearly enough. But there _was_ ARGUS… It wasn't as though he had disagreed with the work they did, or the work they wanted him to do. But the life he had was a good one, and it hardly seemed necessary to disrupt it. Then, one day, it had been disrupted for them, when his wife had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and had paid for this with her life.

Dinah had found herself feeling a bond to him from that day, looking after him as he made his transition into the agent life. She happened to know a thing or two about personal losses leading someone down a new path. Before she'd been an agent of ARGUS, she had been a police officer. She had left the force shortly after the death of her partner, as the events had sent her down something of a dark spiral. And then she had been recruited into ARGUS, initially into their breach team.

She hadn't known about all of that, about that other world so close yet so far away, so few of them did, but once she'd been briefed on the whole situation… Well, she couldn't say that she had been in the right headspace at the beginning of her transition as an agent, but she _could_ say that she had grown to be very grateful to find herself where she was now. The spiral was gone, and in its place she'd found her place. The day she'd met Rene, she knew he would be going down a similar journey, and she was ready to accompany him.

 _He_ hadn't needed to be briefed on Breach Earth and all that it involved. He had discovered much of it on his own, and that had been the thing to draw ARGUS to look at him, to want to bring him on board their team. Well, now he was here, had been for two years, and you could hardly believe he had ever been anywhere else.

"Hey, I've got a signal on a couple unknowns," he called to her as she walked by his station and she was quick to redirect her steps and go see what he had for her.

"Any markers?" she asked. He had been the one to develop a way to differentiate the breachers for their quarters of origin. It wouldn't always be possible to tell, but when it was, his tech never failed. "War? Haven? Mist? Dark?"

"Looking like a couple of Misters to me," he reported, before holding up a finger that said simply 'that came out wrong,' especially with how the footage showed two women.

"Anything else?" she asked, taking note of where they were in the city, any possible targets nearby, if targeting was what they had in mind. It wasn't as though every breacher came to their side with the intent of causing trouble, but then sometimes even those who didn't come looking for trouble found it anyway.

"Could go either way, and I don't want to make any assumptions here, I really don't, but there's been a pattern lately of Mist Quarter folk crossing over and not being all too neighborly, you know?"

"Yeah," she sighed, standing back up. "Alright, I'm going out there, send me coordinates and keep me posted?"

"You got it, Dinah." He was one of those few around here who would call her – and be allowed to call her – Dinah, rather than Agent Drake, as she would call him Rene and not Agent Ramirez.

Now, technically speaking, she _was_ still part of the breach team. But then, even as Rene was making his start two years back, _she_ had been seeing her own responsibilities increased when she had found herself becoming something like a chaperone to some visitors of another kind. These ones didn't come from Breach Earth… They didn't come from any Earth at all. The three of them, two from a world called Krypton, the other from a sister world called Daxam, had come to Earth, tasked with apprehending a fugitive, but when they'd found themselves unable to return home, they had joined forces with ARGUS, putting their seemingly boundless powers into their hands. Dinah had come to be particularly close with the female Kryptonian. Truth be told, she had something of a sister's love for her now.

This night's job could easily have been passed on to her and she surely would have handled it gladly and quickly. But Dinah knew some within ARGUS would argue they shouldn't become too dependent of their intervention. It wasn't her reason for not calling on their Supergirl though. Sometimes _not_ going in all guns blazing did have its benefits. And besides, never would it be said that she couldn't handle herself just fine on her own.

"Rene, talk to me," she spoke into her comms as she neared the area where the two women out of Mist had last been sighted.

"Well, what do you want to hear about first, the Misties or our good friends up in the sky?" She came to a stop, just nearly keeping from rolling her eyes as she absentmindedly turned her gaze up to the dark skies above.

"Misties?" she asked.

"Sounded closer than Misters," he replied. "They're a block north of you now, haven't gone anywhere for about a minute.

"What about the ship?" she started walking again.

It wasn't as though she had anything against the Waverider and its crew. They all did the same job, didn't they? Mostly? They did have ARGUS agents within their ranks, and a lot of the time their work would bring them to cross with her and the local ARGUS force. Dinah didn't have anything against them, no, but she had her own reasons for not treating their passage as though it was the answer to all their troubles. Maybe they had caught on to the present of the Mist women, maybe they were here for a whole other situation. Either way, she wouldn't get distracted from her task.

"Actually doesn't look like they're headed anywhere near you," Rene reported, and she let out a breath. "Oh, hey, hold on, they're on the move again. The breachers, I mean. They're coming back your way." At once she had retreated until she could spot them and fall into a tracking step with them.

Knowing how to differentiate one quarter's breacher from another was something that took time to learn. Some were easier to identify than others, without a doubt. War Quarter tended to present with a lot of tenseness, like they were all just waiting for something to go wrong. Haven folk, coming from a place that was, truth be told, not all that different from their own, would have this searching sort of look in their eyes, like they were just waiting to find the thing that would make them go 'ah, see, this is not like our world at all.' Breachers out of Dark Quarter and its permanent night were so unaccustomed to the light, they were so very pale, so very fearful of that light they'd been deprived of. And Mist Folk, well… they took every breath with the greed of one who couldn't count on a lungful of fresh air at any point in their life, they were practically dizzy for it.

The two women, now that she saw them ambling on down the street, looked to her to be little more than girls, and the way they went, teetering along, they could have been a couple of drunk party girls, if not for the ravages left on them from the air of their home quarter. It almost felt wrong to even consider returning them there. But then just as Rene said, there had been a rash of problems caused by breachers out of Mist Quarter lately, and they couldn't write these girls off until they knew more. Much as they could want to turn a blind eye, they had been fooled before, and the victims of those mistakes made them much more prone to see things through. They could still hope for a good outcome, and Dinah knew Rene would have been on the same page as she was about this. If the Mist girls ended up in the clear, it would be a happy ending for the agents as much as for them.

"Wait," Rene's voice stalled her where she stood.

"What is it?"

"Got three more coming up the other way," he informed her, and she felt herself bracing at once.

"More from Mist?" she asked, keeping the two girls well in sight but also looking for the newcomers.

"No. War," Rene told her. "Headed right for our girls. Dinah, I think they're looking for them."

Dinah frowned to herself. It wasn't as though the people who found their way on to another quarter, or on their Earth here, never found out that there were others out there, never came to interact with them. But something about this just felt wrong. Three out of War, coming to cross with those stumbling girls out of Mist…

So she watched, from a safe distance. She saw the trio arrive, women all of them, and without a doubt coming out of War. Neither of those quarters could be blamed for wanting to seek out another life for themselves, but then they couldn't be given a free pass when they did some of the things they'd been known to do. And what Dinah saw here was a meeting, no doubt to the fact that it had been arranged, for all of them to meet here. An exchange of goods happened. One of the girls pulled something from a satchel and handed it to one of the women, while another of the women presented them with a bag of their own, looking to be payment. Dinah had to make a choice, had to make it quick, as the two groups went on their separate ways.

"Rene, get in touch with the Waverider, put them on the trail of the War women. I'm going after the Mist girls."

"Right," he agreed. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "Know what _I'm_ thinking?"

"What do you think?" Rene asked her, before she heard the click in her ear that told her he was already at work.

Catching up to the Mist girls had not been hard, with the way they were going. Getting them to stop and listen to her had been the harder part. They recognized her for being ARGUS as soon as they saw the insignia on her jacket. They knew ARGUS, like all the breachers did. They had agents stationed in every quarter. They knew ARGUS getting the drop on them here would mean a return to where they came from. For all the effort they'd put into their escape here, 'Agent Drake' finding them felt a lot like the worst thing that could have happened to them. Dinah knew what was in that bag they'd been given. Fake papers, to enable them to settle down on this Earth and disappear from anyone who might peg them for being of Breach Earth, money to help guarantee it. The papers were legit, too, as legit as fake papers could get, and their team had yet to track down the breachers' ID contact though it remained high on their list, because for every teetering Mist girl gulping for air, there was another willing to do just about anything to make it here, even kill.

It had taken some work for the girls to listen to her, and frankly she wasn't entirely sure they actually trusted her. Dinah didn't bother trying to get them to follow her too far, knowing they would only see it as her trying to corner them. She couldn't even tell them that, at this very moment, Rene was tracking down someone and trying to bring her to meet them, to help them do exactly what they set out to do, knowing they'd see it only as reinforcements to apprehend them. The best she could do was stall by talking to them. Once she offered to buy them food, she could see the slightest release of the doubt in them.

Eventually, Rene arrived, accompanied by the police detective. Nyssa Raatko was known to many a breacher – those seeking little more than asylum – as an ally, and even without ever having met her or heard of her, they only needed to speak to her for a minute or so before they knew she was someone they could trust, and so they did, with the relief of two who had gone and found sanctuary at last. She had taken them away, promising to Dinah and Rene both that they would be taken to where they needed to be. Detective Raatko happened to know a few others from Mist who had made their new home just outside the city.

As they watched the trio walk out of sight, Dinah sighed, turning to Rene and telling them what the girls had told her before he'd arrived. The women from War had wanted only one thing as payment for their safe passage, something so simple and freely available to them on Mist, it seemed too good to be true, but now here they were.

"Water… from their quarter," she told him. He frowned, thinking, then he understood. There was no drinking the water from Mist, not unless you were desperately alright with being violently ill… or worse. ARGUS had done their best to bring clean water from their Earth when they'd settled their outpost there, but they could never supply for the demand, and after a while it seemed cruel to try. Getting posted to that quarter felt more like punishment than anything else.

"That's the last thing we need, War Quarter trying to use their water for, what, a weapon?"

"Whatever they're trying to pull, better hope the Waverider's caught up with them before they brought it back to whoever sent them."

"Oh, they did," he told her. "Yeah, heard the report come through while I was chasing down the detective. Apprehended, all clear. We should probably tell them about the Mist water in case this spreads." She made a small noise. "Hey, we did good tonight," he pointed out. You know, as far as I'm concerned, I don't need to be going, sailing off from Earth to Earth or quarter to quarter. I'm perfectly happy to be here, looking after our city, our people."

"And Zoe," she smiled.

"And Zoe," he nodded with that swelling pride showing on his face as it did whenever he spoke of his daughter. He had been doing exactly as he'd said he'd wanted to do, since he'd joined up with ARGUS. She had a good life, and she was happy, they both were. As for Dinah, well… she figured she was doing good work, and especially on a night like this, seeing to it that a couple of girls handed a bad life could make a turn for the better… she knew Vincent would have been happy, too. Still, as much as she could agree with Rene, about looking after their home, she thought about those two girls and she had to think… there were plenty more others like them back across that breach, and not just in Mist. So who was going to look after them?

"Okay, come on, we better get back before we get busted for going off the grid here," she told him as they started back.

"Yes, ma'am, Agent Drake," he tipped his head to her. She gave him a look. "Yeah, no, I knew that didn't sound right."

THE END

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 _Check out the next prelude, coming April 15th!_


End file.
